U.S. State Department’s report on human rights in Azerbaijan is biased

The U.S. State Department's report on human rights in Azerbaijan in 2013 is biased, the spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Elman Abdullayev said in an interview with Trend on March 3.

As in previous years, it represents the situation which differs from the real situation with human rights and democracy in the country, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

The U.S. State Department published its annual report on the state of human rights in the world where it criticized a number of aspects related to human rights in Azerbaijan.

"There was no cooperation with the Azerbaijani state bodies to ensure the objectivity of the document based on subjective judgments voiced by suspicious sources, reflecting unfounded accusations," Abdullayev added.

Based on the experience of previous years and to prevent the U.S. from publishing another biased document full of "methodological mistakes", the Azerbaijani state organizations provided the U.S. State Department with the comments on similar reports from the previous years.

"Unfortunately, neither these comments, nor the Azerbaijani government's important legal and practical actions towards the improvement of human rights protection during the reporting period were reflected in the document," said the spokesman.

The Azerbaijani official added that the U.S State Department's report on the current status of the human rights situation does not reflect reality.

"If there is a goal to improve human rights in the world, we urge the U.S. to make more efforts to improve the international human rights mechanisms," he said. "Publishing such a biased document against Azerbaijan, which created a strong and effective system of protecting human rights in the country, is nothing but the efforts to exert political pressure."